Payroll and vendor records that hold up, clean coding, and a close you can plan around
The bill that hurts a Fort Myers contractor is rarely a tax bill. It is the workers compensation premium audit that lands after a busy rebuild year and charges you for every subcontractor who could not produce a current certificate, as though that crew had been on your payroll. Florida makes construction coverage start at one employee, allows no more than three exempt officers, and expires those exemption certificates every two years. In a market with a constant churn of one-truck subs, that is a documentation problem waiting to happen. We run the payroll and the vendor file so the audit is a formality.
On the ground
First Street, downtown Fort Myers, Lee County
This is the service that pays for itself in one audit cycle. An auditor works from your payroll register, your disbursements and your certificate file, and reaches for the least favorable assumption wherever the records do not support a better one. We keep the records so that assumption is never needed.
Every construction platform claims to have a "QuickBooks integration." Most break the moment your books need to be accurate. Sales tax mismaps, retainage disappears, change orders create duplicates, and job costing reports stop matching project reality. We fix the integration so your software, your books, and your job‑level numbers all tell the same story.
Also work with Foundation, Sage 100, Bill.com, ADP, Gusto, Ramp, and more. See all platforms we integrate →
Job costing does not fail because the theory is difficult. It fails one entry at a time. A supply house ticket posted with no job attached, a lift rental charged to whichever project was open on the screen, a scope change performed and never costed: each is trivial, and together they produce a report nobody acts on.
On a rebuild the sub list turns over constantly, and the payables desk is the only place where documents are either collected or lost forever. Once a subcontractor has been paid in full, the leverage to obtain anything from them is gone.
Southwest Florida contractors carry an unusual amount of money in transit: draws waiting on an association, proceeds waiting on an adjuster, retainage waiting on a condition nobody has read recently. Bookkeeping cannot speed those up, but it can stop them disappearing from view.
Most contractors reach us mid-backlog rather than shopping around. Catch-up is scoped work with a finish date. After that the close is the product: a reconciled file and a construction-formatted package on a date you can plan around. Contractors who then need WIP and claim analysis move up to construction accounting in Fort Myers.
They didn’t just record transactions and call it a day. They built a custom chart of accounts around how a remodeling company actually runs, did a full catch-up on years of bookkeeping inside QuickBooks Online, and now stay on top of my monthly bookkeeping and payroll. Every step, they broke it down in simple terms instead of burying me in accountant talk.
FinTruction rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, with real job costing, work in progress, and retainage. They didn’t just hand me reports and disappear; they walked me through my numbers until I understood them.
Sahil and his team handle the bookkeeping and job costing for my painting business. They cleaned up my books and set up integrations that give me accurate, timely job costing with solid weekly data. Reliable, detailed, and genuinely invested in getting the numbers right.
FinTruction is the only bookkeeping team we’ve found that truly understands construction accounting and WIP reporting. They aligned our income and costs across 21 jobs and gave us full, monthly transparency. Fast, accurate, and an indispensable partner.
When I came to FinTruction I had no financial structure. No job costing, no WIP tracking, books behind. They did a full cleanup and rebuilt job costing and WIP tracking in QuickBooks. Now I know what’s billed, what’s owed, and where every job stands.
A couple of minutes from a contractor we support, sharing what working with FinTruction has been like and what changed once their numbers finally made sense.
A recovery market runs on subcontractors, and it runs through them quickly. Crews arrive for a scope and move on, one-truck operators appear and disappear inside a season, and a company that used to work with a settled list of trade partners finds itself paying vendors it had never heard of a year earlier. That is how the work gets done at speed. It is also why the vendor file, which is the single most compliance-heavy record a contractor keeps, is the first thing to fall behind.
Every new sub needs a W-9, a coverage certificate or a current certificate of election to be exempt, a job to be coded against, and payment terms somebody actually honors. In a company where the office is one person who also answers the phone and orders material, that is four tasks per vendor at exactly the moment there is no time. Nobody notices the gap, because the checks still clear and the work still gets covered.
The reckoning arrives on a schedule, which is the frustrating part. It is the annual premium audit, or a quarterly return filed on estimates, or a general contractor asking for documentation you cannot produce. None of these were hard problems on the day the vendor was set up. All of them are expensive twelve or eighteen months later, and they are usually paid out of a season that has already been budgeted.
The fix is unglamorous. Get current, collect documents at the point of payment rather than the point of panic, code costs as they arrive, and close the month on the same date every time regardless of what the season is doing. Our construction bookkeeping case studies show what that looks like on the other side of a cleanup.
Nothing about the annual audit is decided on the day the auditor arrives. It is decided in the twelve months before, by whether payroll was separated properly, whether every subcontractor certificate was collected and still current, and whether payments can be tied to vendors and jobs.
Construction Coverage Starts at One Employee: Florida requires construction employers to secure workers compensation coverage with one or more employees, including business owners who are corporate officers or limited liability company members. Non-construction employers do not reach the requirement until four or more. That difference is why generic small business guidance misleads contractors so reliably. Practically, it means the coverage cost and the payroll records that support it exist from your first hire, and payroll has to be recorded properly from the first week rather than tidied up once the company feels big enough to bother.
An Uninsured Subcontractor Becomes Your Problem: A contractor is required to verify that subcontractors have secured the required coverage before they begin work on a project, and where a subcontractor has not, that subcontractor workers are treated as the contractor employees for benefit purposes. The consequence shows up twice: as liability if somebody is hurt, and as premium if an auditor finds payments to a sub with no certificate on file. This is a documentary control that lives in accounts payable and has to be exercised before the first payment, because afterwards nobody returns your calls.
Officer Exemptions Are Limited and They Expire: Florida allows construction industry corporate officers to elect exemption only where each owns at least 10 percent of the stock of the corporation, and no more than three officers of a corporation or of any group of affiliated corporations may elect to be exempt. A certificate of election to be exempt issued since 2013 is valid for two years and then lapses. So an exemption is a dated document in your file, not a permanent status, and a company that adds owners or restructures can quietly outgrow the limit without anyone raising it.
Florida Reemployment Tax and the Quarterly RT-6: Florida has no state income tax withholding, which is exactly why contractors here underestimate payroll administration. Reemployment tax is reported on the Employer Quarterly Report, Form RT-6, due by the end of the month following each quarter, and the return is required even for a quarter with no wages. Only the first 7,000 dollars of wages paid to each employee in a calendar year is taxable, and new employers begin at an initial rate of 2.7 percent until their own experience is reflected. With crews turning over between jobs, that wage base is consumed and reset more often than most owners expect.
What the Premium Audit Reads: The audit is a records exercise. It works from your payroll register, your general ledger and cash disbursements, and your certificate file, and it reconstructs what work was performed by whom. Where payroll is not separated in a way that supports the classification you want applied, you are unlikely to get the benefit of it. Where a payment to a subcontractor has no certificate behind it, expect that payment to be treated as payroll. Keeping those two records accurate through the year is ordinary bookkeeping done deliberately, and it is the cheapest insurance work available.
Certified Payroll on Federally Funded Recovery Work: Federally funded and federally assisted construction contracts above 2,000 dollars fall under the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires the applicable wage determination to be paid and a weekly certified payroll to be submitted, generally on US Department of Labor Form WH-347. A good deal of Lee County recovery work carries federal dollars, and contractors whose experience is private and insurance-funded often produce their first certified payroll on one of those jobs. The demand is the weekly rhythm and the requirement that the filed payroll and the job-cost labor agree, so both should come out of one payroll run.
W-9 Collection, 1099-NEC and Worker Classification: A contractor paying a subcontractor 600 dollars or more in a year must file a 1099-NEC, and in a market full of small operators the line between a subcontractor and an employee is tested by auditors rather than by you. Both are handled by the same discipline: collect the W-9 and the coverage or exemption certificate before the first payment, code every payment to the vendor and the job as it happens, and keep the certificate file current. Done that way, January is a print run rather than an investigation.
A general bookkeeper can record transactions. Construction accounting is a different job.
| What you need | Generic local bookkeeper | FinTruction |
|---|---|---|
| Job-level costing | Lumps all jobs into one P&L | Cost codes and margin per project |
| WIP & revenue recognition | Cash-basis, no WIP schedule | Monthly WIP with over/underbilling |
| Retainage tracking | Buried in AR/AP, often missed | Tracked receivable & payable by contract |
| Bonding & lender packages | Not equipped to produce them | Bonding-ready statements and backlog |
| Construction software | QuickBooks set up like a retail shop | QuickBooks + integrations tuned for contractors |
We handle the day-to-day books for contractors across Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties, from restoration and roofing crews still working the recovery to the builders and finish trades on the mainland.
Behind on the Books in Fort Myers?
Get Your Free AuditA fair question when you already have a bookkeeper, a family member doing the entry, or a local firm that has always filed the return. Here is the honest answer.
Contractors who were behind, off the bank, or heading into an audit. Same work, different trades.
Rescue + Monthly
"They built a custom chart of accounts around how a remodeling company actually runs."
$1M+ Rebuild
"FinTruction rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, with real job costing, WIP, and retainage."
Most Fort Myers contractors already pay for the right software. The problem is that it was configured by somebody who was not thinking about cost codes, certificate expiry dates or the difference between a customer payment and an insurance proceed.
We work in QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop daily and we know what a construction file should look like. Setup is the first week. The value shows up in month fourteen, when the file is still clean because somebody has been maintaining it on purpose.
Not sure what shape your file is really in?
If your project managers already track budgets, commitments and change orders in a construction platform, the office should not be entering them a second time. On restoration work that matters more than usual, because the scope moves and the documentation trail is what eventually gets paid.
One set of numbers the field and the office both recognize.
Current books only matter if they arrive in a usable form on a predictable date. This is the package a Fort Myers contractor gets from us, and it lands on the same date in September as it does in February.
Need WIP, insurance proceeds analysis and bonding-ready statements on top? That is our Fort Myers construction accounting service.
Almost always because of subcontractors. Florida requires a contractor to verify that every subcontractor has secured coverage before that subcontractor starts work, and where a sub has not, its workers are treated as the contractor employees for benefit purposes. At audit that translates into the uninsured sub payments being charged to you as if the crew had been on your payroll. The other common cause is payroll that was never separated properly in the records, which leaves an auditor with no basis for applying a lower rated classification. Neither is an insurance problem. Both are bookkeeping problems that were settled months earlier.
In construction, yes. Florida requires construction employers to carry workers compensation with one or more employees, including business owners who are corporate officers or limited liability company members. Non-construction employers do not hit the requirement until four. That single difference catches new companies constantly, because the general small business advice they read online is written for the four-employee rule. The bookkeeping consequence is that coverage cost, and the payroll records that support it, exist from your first hire rather than becoming relevant once you grow.
No, and it is narrower than most people think. Under Florida law, construction industry corporate officers who want to elect exemption must each own at least 10 percent of the stock, and no more than three officers of a corporation or of any group of affiliated corporations may elect to be exempt. A certificate of election to be exempt issued since 2013 is valid for two years and then expires. So an exemption is a document with an expiry date sitting in your file, not a status you acquire once. We track those dates the same way we track subcontractor insurance certificates, because a lapsed one is discovered at the worst possible moment.
Your payroll register, your general ledger and cash disbursements, your certificates for every subcontractor, and enough job detail to show what work was performed. The certificate file is usually where it falls apart. A rebuild market moves fast, a sub shows a card at the start of a job and nobody looks again, and the coverage or the exemption quietly expires in month four. We hold the certificate against the vendor with an expiry date, flag it before it lapses, and keep payments coded to the vendor and the job so the payment history and the coverage history line up.
Florida has no state income tax withholding, which is why contractors here often assume payroll is simple. What does apply is reemployment tax, reported on the Employer Quarterly Report, Form RT-6, and due at the end of the month following each quarter. Only the first 7,000 dollars of wages paid to each employee in a calendar year is taxable, and new employers start at an initial rate of 2.7 percent before their own experience is reflected. With a workforce that turns over between rebuild jobs, that wage base is reached and reset often enough to matter, and the return has to be filed for a quarter even when there were no wages.
We have not met a file past saving. Catch-up runs forward from the last month that genuinely reconciled to the bank rather than the last month somebody clicked reconcile. We pull statements forward, recover supplier and subcontractor bills that were never entered, recode transactions to jobs and cost codes, separate owner draws from job cost, move retainage out of ordinary receivables, and reconcile to the current month. A Fort Myers contractor six to nine months behind is usually current inside two to four weeks. It is scoped work with a finish date, not an open invoice.
It has to, and it starts at data entry rather than at the reporting stage. Money arriving from a carrier is not the same event as a customer paying an invoice, and a supplement approved months later is not the same as a change order. We record the job as claim funded when it opens, keep proceeds received separate from billed revenue, and hold the supporting cost detail against the cost it supports so nothing has to be reassembled. The analysis of whether a rebuild actually earned, and the substantial damage cost records behind it, live on our Fort Myers construction accounting page.
On federal money, yes. Federally funded and federally assisted construction contracts above 2,000 dollars fall under the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires payment of the applicable wage determination and submission of a weekly certified payroll, generally on US Department of Labor Form WH-347. Plenty of Lee County recovery work carries federal dollars, and contractors who have only ever done private and insurance-funded work meet the requirement for the first time on one job. The bookkeeping demand is the weekly cadence and the requirement that the filed payroll agrees with the labor sitting in your job cost, so we produce both from a single payroll run.
During the year, not in January. The W-9 is collected before the first payment is released, which is also the moment to collect the coverage certificate or the certificate of election to be exempt, because that is the only point at which you still have leverage. Every payment is coded to the vendor and the job as it happens, and anyone crossing the 600 dollar threshold is flagged for 1099-NEC filing. Doing it in one pass in January is how stale addresses, missing identification numbers and unreconciled vendor totals end up on filed forms.
We keep books for contractors across Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties, including Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, Captiva, Bonita Springs, Estero, Lehigh Acres, Naples, Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte. Everything is remote, so you get construction-specific bookkeeping without paying toward an office you would never visit, and your CPA can be in the file at the same time you are. Start with the free Audit: send the file and your last bank reconciliation and we will tell you how far out it really is. After that it is a flat monthly fee based on transaction volume, active jobs and payroll. Sahil Ahmad, CPA reviews the work.
FinTruction keeps the books for contractors across Florida. Choose your city for coding, payables, payroll entry and monthly close support in your market.
Bookkeeping is the payroll, the coding, the payables and the close. When you need WIP schedules, insurance proceeds tracked against approved scope, substantial damage cost records and bonding-ready statements, that is our construction accounting service for Fort Myers contractors.
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Working across the state? Construction accounting in Florida
Send us your QuickBooks file, a recent payroll register and your last bank reconciliation. We will tell you how many months are genuinely out, which subcontractors have no W-9 or no current certificate on record, and what it would take to get current. No charge and no obligation for the Audit.
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